


A Lie For An Eye

by Dombell, orphan_account



Category: Muse (Band)
Genre: Art, M/M, Painting, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-15 02:41:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13603848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dombell/pseuds/Dombell, https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Everybody knew he was going to be an artist. It was just a matter of time before they saw what he could really create.





	A Lie For An Eye

**Author's Note:**

> A massive thank you to Dombell for her art. It's absolutely stunning.

He was an artist.

That had, to speak simply, always been his calling. Colors had seemed to pop out at him for most of his life—emerald shimmering leaves, dull flax highlights in eyes and hair, the mixed hues of carnation and cerise that were found inside a mouth. Forms, as well, were always apparent to him. From a young age, he could sketch a person based solely off a few curved lines. When asked how he did it, he’d simply shrug and say that he didn’t know. It just _came_ to him.

It was no surprise, then, when he became a painter. Everyone that knew him had suspected it, it was just a matter of his announcement.

Quickly, he became one of the best painters in the country. Every image he crafted was full of life, as if it would peel off the paper and into your hands when you looked at it. The dancers he drew seemed to move, even if only by a trick of the eye. The foods he painted had the power to make your stomach rumble and churn with desire—if only you could take a single bite. And the eyes of every portrait gazed deep into your soul, digging out all your secrets and lies with just a glance. The paints he used, the textures, the color combinations, they all amassed to a perfect work each time. Quickly, he became rich, each work of his coveted by collectors around the world.

It was after a hundred or so paintings that he shut himself away, leaving behind only his works. New paintings hadn’t appeared for months, then years. Those who had purchased his paintings jacked up viewing prices, fearing that he had died or fallen ill. His works became prized, valued, antiques in a fraction of time.

Rumors began to spread. Some said he had died, they were sure of it—they saw the corpse. Others insisted that he was bedridden from a horrible accident. His fingers were broken and his arms maimed, and he’d never paint again. They would know, they worked at a hospital. A few others were positive that he was still working, although he kept his works in private. He hated, they explained, the fact that he had become famous for the sheer realism of his art and not the _meanings_ of them. Those dictated that everyone needed to take a moment to appreciate what they said, not what they looked like. A tiny group suspected that he had become a witch or monk on a far-away island and cursed all his art for eternity.

The reality was much different, though. He was, in fact, locked away in a studio apartment somewhere. It was a small place, only about fifty square feet, but it fit everything he needed for what he was doing.

What was he doing?

Well, creating the most beautiful work he could, that’s what. Every day for years he’d wake up and work, blending thirteen or fourteen colors at a time to get the perfect shade for his next section. For him, it was just work, yet not at all tedious.

Within the first month, his flat had become a mess. The third month brought along a binge on new paints and palettes. Half a year came with an expired lease, and an almost-lost home. A year in, he restarted entirely.

He refused to let the painting be anything less than perfect.

It took him six years, three tries, and hundreds of paint tubes to achieve the perfection he wanted. His hands were stained apricot and brown, and he reeked of turpentine and linseed oil, but when he took a step back and looked at his work for the final time, he realized that he had finally achieved utter perfection.

The portrait, of a man who did not exist, was simply called Matthew.

After a six-year absence, he returned to the world with Matthew in his arms, framed in black and held out proudly. And the world went wild. Although he refused to sell Matthew, he rented out a separate flat for Matthew to be displayed in, so the public could enjoy his beauty. The rent was easily payed with admission money, and the public was at last happy that their painter had returned from isolation.

But he was not the same, after Matthew. People seemed to notice that his eyes had gotten tired, lined with wrinkles and no longer containing that happiness that they had before his absence. His mouth had similar marks. He generally seemed more irritable, as well—appearing in public became more uncommon, and when he was spotted and recognized, he seemed downright annoyed. Overall, it felt as if Matthew had changed him for the worst.

It was the opposite—for him, at least. Whenever he was in the room with Matthew, he felt like his heart would burst. Just gazing at the sheer beauty that was his creation had him almost in tears every day. He found himself sleeping in the room where Matthew was kept, and then eating, and then hardly leaving. He suspected it was Matthew’s eyes—he’d spent months on making sure the azure sparkled as it would if real light shone upon it. Whenever he was with Matthew, he felt he could stare at him and have full conversations just with his eyes.

Even if Matthew was only a painting.

Each day, he grew closer to Matthew. He gave the painting a personality, a voice inside his head for their conversations, a favorite color and food and animal. He wanted to know _everything_ about Matthew. They would “talk,” so to speak, for hours on end every day, and he often closed the room off from the public just to continue one of their “conversations.” Soon, he found himself looking not just at Matthew, but _inside_ Matthew.

He wanted nothing more than for Matthew to be real. For every time he looked at that smooth skin, he wondered how those pores might feel under his callused and stained fingertips. Every day, he wondered how Matthew might hold his hand—would he intertwine their fingers, or just hold their palms together? Those thoughts became increasingly common as the days passed, until he found himself wondering how his body would feel against Matthew’s.

It was at that point, when he started thinking about a coarse line of hair under Matthew’s navel, that he realized he was in love. Of course, it made sense; Matthew was _his._ He was bound to love him.

When that realization came into play, he found himself craving Matthew’s body. It became no longer a want, but a _need,_ to feel Matthew’s tender pale limbs holding him close. Would he be hot and sweaty, or lukewarm but homey, like hours-old bath water? What about his fingers—were they tender and curious, or insistent and sure? He could obviously make up answers to his own questions, as Matthew was not real, but those answers would never be as good as if he could experience them for himself.

He stopped painting, for good. Time after time he insisted that painting was a waste of time, as it distracted him from spending time with Matthew. The public was obviously dismayed, but they could not sway him to reconsider.

Matthew, who had before only been an idea, had become the center of his universe.

He’d gone out in search of someone to fill the physical void that Matthew could not. But every man that he slept with did not satisfy his needs—they were too dark, or too blond, or too rough, or too bulky. Nobody could ever fit his perception of what Matthew was, but that was okay for him. After all, nobody in the real world was perfect.

After another tedious year of near isolation, barely leaving the room Matthew resided in, he decided to take a break. He realized at that point that Matthew was never going to be real, and that he needed to sort out his priorities before continuing to paint. The artist took to the streets, using his talent to sketch people he saw on trains and in parks.

Even though he hadn’t seen Matthew for a week, however, he found that all his drawings had his face. They all had the slim stature, and a shock of unruly mulch-colored hair. Desperately, he tried to make the drawings fatter—but they just became Matthew with a filled form, Matthew as a businessman. When they were older, they were Matthew as an elderly man who had lived a fulfilling life. When they were women, they were Matthew in drag. The same with children, the short, the tall, the crippled, the strong. They were all _him._

He couldn’t escape Matthew, even when he left him.

In a last attempt to clear his mind, he went back to the flat where Matthew was kept. He gazed upon the painting that had taken years of his life, the painting that was cherished by thousands, if not millions of people. And he begged it to get out of his head. He apologized profusely for leaving, but explained that he needed time away. He pleaded for Matthew to understand.

But Matthew told him no.

No matter how much he begged, Matthew seemed to insist, even without speaking, that the artist needed to stay with him _and only him._

It was then that the artist forced his own eyes out of his skull. In a horrifying realization, the flat was accidentally opened to the public, which found the artist lying face-down on the floor, bleeding out, two oval eyeballs laying on the ground next to him. The very same paintbrushes he used to create Matthew were clutched in his fists. Browning, rotting blood gave the room a vile, sickeningly pungent odor.

When word got out, he was flooded with questions. Why would he do such a thing? How would he paint? What would he be doing in the future?

He had no answers. The only thing he would say, over and over, was that he’d rather live in a world where he couldn’t see, if it meant that Matthew would be happy. _Matthew, the painting?_ Of course, who else?

Everybody was baffled. Why would he, a man with immeasurable talent and undoubtable success, take away the one thing that had granted him with such?

Matthew was always the answer.

But it seemed, then, that Matthew was not happy. He would occupy the artist’s thoughts, which had become more vivid after the loss of his sight. Each word spoken by Matthew seemed utterly audible, each touch seemed as if he would melt into it. He was known to have violent mood swings—he’d be happy one moment, insisting that Matthew loved him and that was all he needed. The next, though, he’d be sobbing, wondering why Matthew had abandoned him.

Simply put, he’d gone mad.

Then, of course, came the incident. It seemed inevitable, considering the circumstances. But that didn’t stop it from being shocking to all his fans.

On a Friday night, an anonymous call from a young man came to the emergency line. He said that the artist’s building was on fire, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He requested that the fire department rush to the scene at once. Firemen came on blaring trucks, where they found that the artist had finally succumbed to Matthew’s wishes and set himself alight. It destroyed the building and everything in it, including the portrait with azure eyes. For days, even weeks after, the area surrounding the building had a coppery, acrid scent. Many refused to pass by it—be it out of respect or disgust, no one could tell.

When the frame was recovered, though, tests were taken on it, and it seemed that it had not been destroyed in the fire, but right before it. There were no ashes on some parts, and those seemed to resemble hands. Clawing fingers, even.

There are countless theories about what that could mean. The most common was that the artist, while burning, had clutched onto the frame, pleading for Matthew to help him survive when there was no hope. There’s one that Matthew never existed, and the artist simply went insane. There’s another that Matthew was removed from the building prior to the fire and was replaced by a rough draft. One even suggests that there _was_ no artist. A lesser known one is that Matthew escaped from the painting, and had planned to kill the artist the entirety of its existence. Those say that if you take a single glance at a picture of Matthew, you’ll burn, just like his artist did.

If anyone would know which one of those is right, though, it would of course

be

me.

Thus, we reach the end of our tale, and—oh, are you confused?

I wasn’t just going to sit there.

You’re fine, as long as you haven’t looked at me—wait, you _have?_ Up there?

Ah, shame. I’ve grown rather fond of you.


End file.
